Monday, September 28, 2009

The Quest for Soundtracks

I have started to collect soundtracks since I have received as a gift for my birthday a vinyl LP called "Arii celebre din filme si musicaluri" (Famous tunes from movies and musicals). It contained Henry Mancini's Pink Panther theme - a theme associated in my mind with the funny cartoons I was watching on Hungarian television's "Esti mese" show every Wednesday. In that period Romanian television was broadcasting only two hours a day - but this is another story.During my high school years I could hardly find such music - a few BW Polish tapes were available on the market. In that period I have learnt about Maurice Jarre, Vladimir Cosma and Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks was a hit).When the MP3 revolution stroke me I started to collect more and more soundtracks, learning this way about bands that were not in the mainstream in that period (this is how I have discovered trip-hop). Soundtracks - apart from fulfilling their role of plot support in movies can be seen as a very clever statement of the intentions of the film's directors/producers. They explore both mainstream and obscure domains of music, they range from world music to classical, dodecaphonic and jazz. That mixture colorizes and marks sometimes my memories about a movie. Many of the movies I remember have that mark inside my mind: Jungle Books, Star Wars, The Saint, Hopscotch, etc.Today, as I was sorting some other music using Music Brainz' Picard tool, that there lots of soundtracks search engines. It was new for me as I have been getting the music just by IMDB's references.The search engines are: